The joys of brain scrubbing: the advantages of memory deletion in a collectively omniscient world.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Columns - Column

THE LAB RAT'S lot wasn't easy to begin with, but now it may get worse. At the SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, researchers have figured out how to delete rodent memories. According to The New York Times, the SUNY researchers initially teach the rats to negotiate a chamber that shocks their feet if they choose the wrong path. Then, after the rats have learned the right path to take, their brains are injected with a drug called ZIP. The chemical neutralizes PKMzeta, a molecule that plays a crucial but not wholly understood role in memory retention. Once injected, the rats quickly forget their hard-earned knowledge regarding safe routes through the chamber. Every step they take offers a potential shock.

This development has troubling implications. Say the CIA starts torturing lab rats: Who would even know, if the rats retain no recollection of their ordeal? Imagine the crimes sexual predators could get away with if equipped with enough zip and a solid grasp of human neocortical columns. And don't even think about what could happen if the fashion industry could erase our memories of parachute pants and belly shirts.

Perhaps because the kind of memory management miracles that neuroscience has in store for us have been the stuff of science fiction, we tend to see their potential impacts through an extremely dramatic lens. On the one extreme, you have conspiracists predicting sinister government campaigns to turn us into docile slaves. On the other, you have idealists promising an end to post-traumatic stress disorder and Alzheimer's. In both cases, the presumption is that our imminent neurotechnologies will mostly involve erasing bad, profoundly significant memories. The stuff that wakes us up at night in a cold sweat. The stuff that makes shrinks rich.

But these predictions anticipate only a part of the story. When SUNY's researchers perfect their art to the point where they can erase specific memories as easily as we toss last year's Excel files in the Windows recycling bin, why waste that opportunity on your greatest demons? I'll be asking them to remove all memories of pizza, discovering A.J. Liebling, and riding a bike across the Golden Gate Bridge at dawn. It's the good memories I'd like to annihilate, and no doubt millions feel the same. Imagine falling in love for the first time, again and again and again; hearing your all-time favorite album with completely fresh ears; rediscovering the virtues of martinis.

Naysayers...